The Art of Piano Performancehttp://theartofpianoperformance.me
Art is an alchemical technology it must be used positively to impact personal transformation, human transformation and planetary transformationSun, 19 Jul 2015 15:23:33 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/76bebc1aa968c897975507da04a3e3c3?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngThe Art of Piano Performancehttp://theartofpianoperformance.me
Beethoven’s Tempesthttp://theartofpianoperformance.me/2015/07/09/beethovens-tempest/
http://theartofpianoperformance.me/2015/07/09/beethovens-tempest/#commentsThu, 09 Jul 2015 11:40:00 +0000http://theartofpianoperformance.me/2015/07/09/beethovens-tempest/The Art of Piano Performance:Ludwig van Beethoven’s Seventeenth Piano Sonata The Tempest In 1800-1802 Ludwig van Beethoven experienced devastating internal turmoil in trying to come to terms with his hearing loss. To the outside world, his life seemed to be ideal, with his success as a virtuoso pianist and as a…]]>

The Tempest In 1800-1802 Ludwig van Beethoven experienced devastating internal turmoil in trying to come to terms with his hearing loss. To the outside world, his life seemed to be ideal, with his success as a virtuoso pianist and as a successful, sought after composer in Vienna. He gradually began to withdraw from society and friends, however, as he felt it would be detrimental to his successful career as a musician if people found out he was going deaf. People felt he was being misanthropic, yet it was quite the opposite. Beethoven lived in a great deal of solitude and loneliness due to his impending and eventual complete deafness, which would eventually have a profound effect on his spiritual and creative growth as a composer and a musician. The years of 1800-1802 were a transformative period in Beethoven’s life, and marked the beginning of…

‘Each note in a composition should be polished until it is as perfect as a jewel…those wonderful scintillating, ever-changing orbs of light. In a really great masterpiece each note has its place just as the stars, the jewels of heaven, have their places in their constellations. When a star moves it moves in an orbit that was created by nature.

Great musical masterpieces owe their existence to mental forces quite as miraculous as those which put the heavens into being. The notes in compositions of this kind are not there by any rule of man. They come through the ever mystifying source which we call inspiration. Each note must bear a distinct relation to the whole…’

Chopin comes before us, then, as a man of extremely complex make-up, and there is no easy solution to the problems which his personality and the music through which it was expressed present to his modern interpreter. One can only approach him by sweeping aside the clutter of trivial romantic legend which has accumulated around his name and his works. When all the sentimentality, pathos, patriotic fairy-takes and garbled ‘memories’ have been cleared away he appears in simple dignity as Thomas Carlyle saw him in 1848-a great artist and ‘a noble and much suffering human being’. He was more than any other musician of his period the ‘artist’ in that word’s most absolute sense. His mind was never diverted from its single, absorbing preoccupation by any chasing after will-o’-the wisps in the field of literature, the visual arts, politics, social questions or abstract theorizing. To some it will seem a weakness that he should have lived in a world of upheaval and rapid change without ever allowing himself to be ‘committed ‘or ‘engaged’, as our modern jargon puts it. Yet it was therein that his strength lay. He was dedicated to the one task of exploring the world he new best -that of his own heart and imagination; and in giving shape to what he discovered within himself it turns out that he was embodying in his music those unchanging essentials of feeling which ordinary inarticulate humanity recognizes but cannot express for itself. In limiting himself to the piano he in no way crippled or tied down his genius, for by his natural affinity with his instrument he was provided with a sufficient outlet for the wealth of sensibility with which his double inheritance had endowed him…
Arthur Hesley

The toccata an extensive piece intended primarily as a display of manual dexterity written for keyboard instruments reached its apex with Johann Sebastian Bach in the eighteenth century. Johann Sebastian Bach’s seven Toccatas incorporate rapid runs and arpeggios alternating with chordal passages, slow adagios and at least one or sometimes two fugues. The Toccatas have an improvisational feel to them analogous to the fantasia. Unlike the Well Tempered Clavier, English suites, French suites and other sets, Bach himself did not arrange them into a collection. When JS Bach left Weimar the Toccata at that time was out of fashion. They became in vogue again after his death and were organized into a collection. The g minor Toccata is one of the more obscure of the toccatas and has rarely been performed partially due to the extensive second fugue with its many thorny passages of the contrasting gigue…

]]>http://theartofpianoperformance.me/2015/04/20/toccata-bwv-915-by-johann-sebastian-bach-2/feed/0theuniversallanguageofmusicA Brief Guide to Baroque Performance Practicehttp://theartofpianoperformance.me/2015/04/09/a-brief-guide-to-baroque-performance-practice/
http://theartofpianoperformance.me/2015/04/09/a-brief-guide-to-baroque-performance-practice/#commentsThu, 09 Apr 2015 12:35:11 +0000http://theartofpianoperformance.me/2015/04/09/a-brief-guide-to-baroque-performance-practice/Take Note:By Jacy Burroughs The Baroque period is defined as the advent of opera to the death of Bach, which was roughly 1600-1750. Each period of classical music is characterized by its own styles, techniques, and musical characteristics. While most people do not have the option to play on historically accurate…]]>

The Baroque period is defined as the advent of opera to the death of Bach, which was roughly 1600-1750. Each period of classical music is characterized by its own styles, techniques, and musical characteristics. While most people do not have the option to play on historically accurate instruments, it is still important to work toward historically informed performance by studying the musical style of that time. Several important characteristics of Baroque music are outlined below.

In the sphere of piano performance or piano artistry there are few human activities where the necessity for extraordinary physical prowess is so closely aligned with the greatest intellectual and emotional capacities.

The virtuoso must possess a memory capable of maintaining thousands of pages of music in the mind and fingers, under the stress and distractions of public performance; the virtuoso must be cultured and self-aware, musically able to convey the great range of meaning embodied within a chosen repertoire; the virtuoso must project both physical excitement and emotional communication; and the virtuoso must experience life to the fullest while remaining cloistered with an instrument in a relentless quest to maintain his or her craft at its highest level.

]]>http://theartofpianoperformance.me/2015/03/03/virtuosity-piano-artistry/feed/0theuniversallanguageofmusicAttributes & Depth Required to Interpret Chopinhttp://theartofpianoperformance.me/2015/02/11/attributes-depth-required-to-interpret-chopin/
http://theartofpianoperformance.me/2015/02/11/attributes-depth-required-to-interpret-chopin/#commentsWed, 11 Feb 2015 02:39:16 +0000http://theartofpianoperformance.me/2015/02/11/attributes-depth-required-to-interpret-chopin/]]>A capricious, even morbid, temperament is demanded, and there must be the fire that kindles and the power that menaces; a fluctuating, wavering rhythm yet a rhythmic sense of excessive rectitude; a sensuous touch, yet a touch that contains an infinity of coloring; supreme musicianship-Chopin was a musician first, poet afterwards; a big nature overflowing with milk and honey; and, last of all, you must have suffered the tribulations of life and love, until the nerves are whittled away to a thin sensitive edge and the soul is aflame with the joy of death’ James Huneker﻿